


love isn't supposed to hurt

by excelxiors



Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Angst, Child Abuse, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Panic Attacks, Vegas Era, Violence, boris gets beaten but doesn't just shrug it off this time, theo tries to comfort him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 16:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20659877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/excelxiors/pseuds/excelxiors
Summary: for boris, love was violence. the only person in the world who should have been obligated to love him treated him like shit, and he undoubtedly conflated that treatment with love in his head





	love isn't supposed to hurt

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for all the really positive comments on my last work. it really makes me day to read everything you have to say, and people were telling me to keep writing so i wrote another! 
> 
> tw for child abuse and violence  
it's stuff that happens in the book but its more serious and more in detail

He had been hit. I wasn’t used to seeing Boris upset; he generally took it surprisingly lightheartedly when his dad hit him, laughing it off and telling me “Is okay, Potter! He loves me.” He would assure me that his father would apologize for the abuse, and that it would all be okay tomorrow. That he didn’t know how to show his affection, but that he loved him nonetheless. But he looked upset then, and hurt. A dark bruise was already forming on his eye, his nose was leaking a constant stream of blood, and he was limping. The pain he was in was palpable. I felt sick just looking at him, and seeing tears in his eyes was almost enough to make me cry. He never cried.

He had made me stay in his room that night, begging me to remain quiet while he went to deal with his father. I could hear his dad yelling. Russian, or Ukrainian maybe. I couldn’t tell the difference back then. I heard Boris speak back, and then a bang and a scream. Mr. Pavlikovsky’s cane against Boris’ face, and then what I can only assume were his boots against Boris’ curled up body once he was on the ground. I could hear Boris screaming, and I quietly begged whoever would listen to make it end. The sounds of the cane and Boris’ screams and the volatile Russian were enough to make me panic even before I saw Boris. After what felt like hours of hearing Boris scream and whimper in pain through a closed door, I saw him. The blood on his face and the tears in his eyes and a bruise that obscured almost half of his face. He limped towards the edge of the bed, where I had been sitting and failing to ignore the sounds that were coming from the house’s first floor, and collapsed onto me. His breathing was heavy, his blood stained my shirt, and he was shaking violently. A panic attack. Boris was usually the one to comfort me, stroking my back through my nightmares and wrapping his arms around me when I cried. I took a page out of his book and grabbed onto him, squeezing him in the way that had always been comforting to me. “Shhh, shhh,” I whispered. “You’re okay, it’s okay. I’m here.”

“Is not okay, Potter.” Boris sounded awful, the words coming out in between jagged breaths. “I cannot breath.” His blood had completely soaked through my shirt, and his tears were beginning to create a wet spot as well. 

“You’re right, it’s not okay. I know. What he does to you is not okay, Boris. But you will be. You’re going to be okay, Boris. You just need to breath.” I echoed the things Boris had said to me in the past. That what happened to me wasn’t okay, but that I would be okay. I didn’t believe any of it when he said it to me, but it seemed appropriate now. Boris was still shaking, so I held onto him tighter. I had never seen him cry like this, never seen him such a mess. “Breath with me Boris. Listen.” I took long, deep breaths, holding them in for a couple of seconds before letting them out. He didn’t lift his head from my chest, but I could feel him breathing. “Good, keep doing that.”

“I should not cry,” he choked out. “He hears me cry he will just beat me more.” His breathing had slowed a bit, but it was nowhere near normal and he was clearly still distressed.

“He’s gone, Boris. He left. I heard him go.” 

“Yes, but sometimes he does not go. I cannot get into habit of crying, Potter. I don’t want him to hit me more.”

I had never heard Boris admit that he didn’t want to be hit. Nobody wants to be hit, but Boris usually played off his father’s abuse with such casual nonchalance that the admission was startling to me. “Come live with me, Boris. You can stay at my place as long as you want.”

“You know I cannot,” Boris sighed. “I can stay there when he’s not here, but he will not let me leave for good.” He looked up at me for the first time since he’d come into the room. The blood from his nose was still running, down his lips but also smeared on his face from his time against my shirt. His eye looked almost swollen, and the bruise was getting darker. He looked as if he had been in a fight, and I must have visibly reacted because he smirked at me, crooked teeth and all before asking “That bad, Potter?” He was still crying, but he had calmed down enough to crack jokes, which came as a big relief to me.

“We should clean it,” I said. “Your nose, I mean. And your face.”

“Okay. Just one more minute, Potter.” He put his face back into my shirt, wrapped his arms around my neck, and stayed like that for a little while. He was trying to control his breathing, I think, and after a bit of silence he looked back up at me and said “Lets go.”

I walked with him to the bathroom, him leaning heavily on me and my arms around him. The hall was dark, and the house seemed eerily quiet now without hearing Boris crying and his father screaming. “Do you have any washcloths?” I asked, sitting Boris down on the closed toilet seat.

“Probably not. We have nothing here,’’ he answered. “Check the cabinet, maybe?” He was right. There were no washcloths in the cabinet, and also nothing in the cabinet at all.

“Nothing.” 

“Figures.” He laughed a little, then rubbed his hand under his nose, smearing the blood there all around. He looked at his hand afterwards and moaned “It still is not stopping. Do I put my head back?”

‘Uhh, no? I think tilt it forward to get the blood out.” I really didn’t know, but the thought of the blood going down Boris’ throat from his nose didn’t seem good. “Here.” I pulled off my shirt, already ruined from Boris’ blood, and put it under his nose. When he tilted his head forward, blood started to flow in a steady stream, dripping onto the shirt but mostly covering his lips and chin. When the blood finally stopped flowing, I stuck the clean and dry part of my now completely blood covered shirt under the tap, getting the fabric wet. “Put your head up now,” I told Boris. “We should probably clean it.”

“Give it to me, Potter.” He held his hand out, and I gave him the shirt. He rubbed the damp fabric on his face, moving the blood under his nose and on his lips around until it was mostly gone. “Good?”

“Yeah, I guess.” There wasn’t much we could do other than clean up the blood and watch as Boris’ bruise darkened. He said no when I suggested we just call the police and get his dad arrested, because like me, he would have had nowhere else to go. He was worried that they’d deport him or stick him in foster care, and I couldn’t blame him for being afraid. “You should probably change your clothes. They have blood all over them.” While my pants were clean, Boris’ were covered in splatters of blood. 

“Here,” he said, pulling off his shirt and pants and handing them to me. We were far beyond the point of being embarrassed around each other, but Boris hugged his arms around his chest anyways, like he was cold and trying to warm himself. I could see the bruises on his side now. “I think maybe he broke a rib,” Boris admitted. “It fucking hurts.”

“You should go lay down,” I told Boris. “Try not to move around too much or lay on it weird, though. I’m gonna go throw this stuff in the wash.”

I walked Boris back to his room, his weight on me in a way I wasn’t used to. He was a good head taller than me, but I’d always assumed he was light simply because he was so thin. He didn’t feel light, though. He felt like dead weight, and finally getting him into his room was a relief. He sat on the edge of his bed, then took a deep breath before slowly leaning back until his head was on the bed but his feet were still hanging off. “I’ll be right back,” I promised. “Just try and relax.” Boris gave a noncommittal groan that I took to mean yes, and I went as quickly as I could to the small laundry room down the hall, picking the dirty clothes up from the bathroom floor and counter. I didn’t know how to get blood stains out of clothes, so I just stuck my shirt and Boris’ shirt and pants into the machine with some detergent. 

I had hoped Boris would have put some clothes on, but once I got back to his room I found him exactly as I had left him. Naked except for his underwear, laying on the edge of the bed. “Aren’t you cold?” I asked him. “You should at least get under the covers.” The winters in Las Vegas were colder than I thought they would be, and Boris’ house didn’t have much in terms of heating. The two of us had spent many nights sleeping on Boris’ bed, our limbs tangled together to keep warm. Boris didn’t answer, and he didn’t move, so I kicked my pants off and got under the covers of his bed as best I could. “Boris, come.”

Slowly, he pushed himself up onto the bed, until his head was near mine. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I don’t want to make you worry.” He got under the blanket with me, and I wrapped my arms around him. His skin was cool to the touch and his ribs jutted out. It was a sickly reminder of how malnourished he actually was, subsisting almost entirely on a diet of beer, vodka, and bread with sugar. “I should not cry in front of you, Potter. You are easily upset and I do not want to bother you with this. I’m sorry.” He sounded panicked, like he couldn’t control what he was saying.

“Don’t apologize, Boris. He treats you horribly. You don’t have to lie to me and say it’s okay, or lie and say he actually loves you.” I was stroking his back now, where his spine stuck out more than it should have. “This house doesn’t have clean water, and you don’t have food, and it isn’t because he can’t afford it. It’s because he doesn’t care. You deserve better.”

“He is trying his best, Potter. He loves me.”

“No, Boris. He isn’t. He can leave for weeks at a time if he wants. Fine. But leaving you here with nothing to eat and then coming home only to beat you isn’t his best. That’s not love. He spends all his money on vodka, and he leaves nothing for you.” I was getting upset. I had seen the way Boris lived, and despite all of his proclamations that it was fine, I got a strong and distinct feeling that it wasn’t. “I know you don’t want to get hit, Boris.”

“No,” he admitted. “I do not.” He seemed on the verge of tears again, his breathing getting heavy. He sounded as if he was trying to hold back sobs for a minute, but he wasn’t very successful. I could feel the sobs wrack his body, starting all at once and not stopping.

“Shh, relax.” I rubbed his spine some more, and hugged him closer to keep him warm.

“I can’t.” He seemed to be in the midst of another anxiety attack. He had just calmed himself down less than 20 minutes before, but his anxiety was back full force. I heard him trying to do the deep breathing I had showed him before, but after a minute he said “Is not working, Potter. I’m going to die, I think.”

“No you’re not,” I promised.

“It hurts so bad.” He was crying, and his hands rested above the hand I had on his ribs. I continued to stroke his back with one hand, and interlocked our fingers with the other. We laid like that for a while: my left hand rubbing Boris’ spine and my right clasped hard in his. He was squeezing it tight, the way I used to squeeze my mother’s hand when I was afraid. She was gone now, but I could remember the feeling of her hand on mine, comforting me. Boris never had anyone to hold his hand when he was afraid. I don’t think he ever had anyone to love him, not truly.

“Boris,” I said quietly, like I was telling him a secret. And maybe I was, but it was one I was pretty sure he already knew, at least to some extent. “I love you, you know.”

“Yeah?” He didn’t seem so sure. For Boris, love was violence. The only person in the world who should have been obligated to love him treated him like shit, and he undoubtedly conflated that treatment with love in his head.

“Yeah. And I’d never hurt you. Love isn’t supposed to hurt. You shouldn’t have to get beat for it or starve for it. Stop making excuses for him, Boris.”

“Is so hard, Potter,” he admitted. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I know.” He had stopped sobbing, but there were still tears in his eyes. “I just want you to know that you don’t deserve that, Boris. You don’t deserve to be treated the way he treats you. You deserve everything good in the world.” I paused, and took my hand off his back to wipe the tears from his eyes. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time, and you deserve nothing but happiness.”

“That would be nice, eh? If we got what we deserved, your mother wouldn’t be dead and I would be back in Indonesia. The people there were so good to me, Potter. Here? They look at me funny and don’t listen to what I say.” He had told me before about his time in Indonesia, converting to Islam because of his love for the people there. His Islamic name: Badr al-Dine, an homage to the full moon.

“But then we wouldn’t have met. I miss her every day, Boris, but meeting you was the one good thing to come out of all of this. I couldn’t do this without you.” I looked at him, then. Blood dried around his nose, a massive bruise covering nearly half of his face, his gaunt features and crooked teeth. He was beautiful in a sort of starving way, like there was always something more he needed. 

He smiled at me, and said “I am glad we have met, though the circumstances were not the best. You are all I have here, Potter.”

We didn’t move that night, staying nearly naked under the covers. We kept our bodies pressed to one another to stay warm, though I took more caution than usual due to Boris’ suspected broken rib. I watched him as he slept, delicate and beautiful in a way that probably would have made him self conscious had he been able to see how he looked. His dark eyelashes against his almost sickly pale white skin, his bony limbs, and the delicate rise and fall of his chest. His breathing had finally evened out in sleep, and his anxiety had probably tired him, as he passed out shortly after we finished our conversation. I didn’t sleep much that night. I spent the hours mostly watching Boris and making sure that he was okay. He didn’t wake up from any nightmares like I usually did, and didn’t toss and turn in his sleep at all. When I did sleep, I rested my head in the crook of Boris’ neck, thanking a nameless higher power for bringing me to Las Vegas when it did. Out of anywhere in the world that I could have ended up, and at any time in history, I was fortunate enough to exist in the same place and time as Boris Pavlikovsky, and that was a privilege. Knowing and loving Boris was possibly the greatest thing that every happened to me. I sometimes can’t help but think he deserved someone better than me, someone who could have truly loved him without hurting him at all, but I also can’t help but think that there is nobody in the world who could have loved Boris more than I did then.


End file.
